It is a time of unexpected occurrences! For one, we’ve written more about Call of Duty this week than we normally do in an entire year. That might be a slight exaggeration, but we tend to provide more coverage of actual gill-endowed, often delicious cod than we do COD. Recently, however, there’s been a fair deal of – gasp – rather interesting news about Activision’s endlessly annualized behemoth. And the latest tidbit? Apparently Infinity Ward’s actually putting a lot of extra work into Call of Duty: Ghosts‘ PC version. WHAT UNIVERSE IS THIS.

Speaking with Kotaku, executive producer Mark Rubin explained that Ghosts’ PC port will be far from ghastly. To the contrary: he claims it’ll even top the next-gen versions – graphically, at least.

“PC is taking a different tack from previous games [in the series]. Now, PC has its own set of assets [instead of just reusing console assets]. It’s going to look better than any Call of Duty we’ve ever made on PC. They’re actually using an even higher version in many cases than the next-gen consoles, from a texture standpoint.”

Exciting! Granted, Call of Duty’s never really been known for its looks, so I’m not expecting anything particularly mind-blowing.

It bears mentioning, however, that Infinity Ward’s been extremely cagey on the subject of dedicated servers, which doesn’t bode particularly well. That said, Rubin did say he can’t talk about that “yet” in a chat with Eurogamer. So perhaps a reveal’s on the way this time around – as opposed to the typical hope-crushing killstreak denial we’ve grown so accustomed to? We shall see, I suppose.

So, Call of Duty: Ghosts. It has playable women and dogs and graphics and dudes and guns! That’s so many things that they just barely fit on one set of fingers. In other words, nearly infinity. Speaking of, do you find yourself feeling swayed by Infinity Ward’s kind of vaguely appealing promises?

@Buzzmong: You know that small server in a datacentre that you and your friends used to rent? Yeah, that’s a dedicated server. And you’re wrong that dedicated servers mean less control and no mods. They often mean more control and mods. Any control exerted over their deployment, running, etc, etc is at the behest of the game’s developer/publisher. The fact that you see Dedicated right alongside Server, simply means that the server is dedicated to running the game, and nothing else (like VOIP for instance).

P2P is so much worse in so many ways it’s not even funny how stupid it is to prefer P2P over a dedicated server.

I’m fine with having dedicated servers in my FPS, but just allow players to create their own servers. It’s the whole “lockdown” of your game I’m against. Why not allow players to play the game they want? Some people love the vanilla experience, the crafted and carefully balanced experience, while others fly around with Gunboats and Beggar’s Bazooka in TF2 10x maps, dropping barrages of 30 rockets from above. What’s wrong with allowing both types of gameplay?

Lock-down of the game has nothing to do with dedicated servers.
There is ofc two types of dedicated servers. The one where you need to rent server maintained by some official providers (like Battlefield 3) or the one where you can just host the server yourself where you want (Killing Floor).
But both allow you customization of your server (directly on your server, or usually via some web-tool with providers). With the providers you are just paying for stability of server, hosting on quality hardware and net, with guaranteed uptime.
In the end it depends what developers allow you to do with that particular game.
And there is ofc nothing wrong with allowing both types of gameplay, and I didn’t say there is.

In PC multiplayer people want to be able to run their own servers to customise the options (maps, player numbers etc) free from a central dedicated server. On consoles where this has never really been an option, people want dedicated servers to run the game instead of one player acting as the ‘host’ and creating a bottleneck around their connection, as well as one person having a host advantage (zero lag)

It is funny, how one half of the posters here does not understand, what a dedicated server is, while the other half is completely puzzled about the entire debate.

In gaming, “dedicated server”, while meaning more in the IT lingo, is a computer, that has only one job, running a multiplayer server, instead of having one player in the network host the game and all other players join this game, so that one computer does not have to be powerful enough, to compute everything for every player. This was long before game companies stopped releasing the server software and started to host the servers themselves. “Dedicated server” is not a term to describe the current business model of having only central servers and no custom servers. When a gamer says “dedicated server”, he means a server binary and all the assets required to run a server on a lan or the web. This is why we want dedicated servers and this is why it is so confusing, when somebody says, that he does not want them.

Call of duty and Battlefield stopped having player ran dedicated servers and ran everything centralized with (on some years) an option to rent a private server. So I think we have a bunch of confused COD/BF fans in here.

They need to save the system from BO 2 : it’s a matchmaking, but it launches, not on a player’s machine, but on a dedicated server. In this case you mostly cannot cheat, use scripts, custom rules and so on. You just play the vanilla game as it shoud be.

Take this with a grain of salt, because no, it bloody well won’t be. It’s going to be prettier, yes, but the multiplayer will still be fundamentally broken by the fact that it plays about four or five times more fast-paced on PC than on consoles. The game will still be designed for consoles and will likely still have piss-poor balance, especially since this isn’t a Treyarch one.

I haven’t played CoD since MW1, so maybe that’s why it’s funny to me that you would lament that this game is not made by the developers of the console exclusive blockbuster; Call of Duty 2: Big Red One.

Yeah, pretty much always — since it became the multiplayer-centric success of COD4. It was the first game I ever found where I surprised myself by admitting that it was better on console and sucked on PC. The server configurations everyone ran were just idiotic. Too many players on too tiny maps in a version of the game that seemed amped-up compared to the already-fast console version. When you have 24-48 people on a 12 player map, it’s nothing but spawn-die-spawn-die. *yawn*

But, frankly, that’s fine with me. COD is the kind of game I’d want to play on a console. If I were going to bother sitting at my desk and play on a computer, then I would sure as fuck play something better.

I suspect the dog will die; but in a twist at the end of the game, the player will finish their super intense battle and save the day, but spare a moment for their fallen comrade(s). As they look out in to the distance, they will hear a bark. The camera will cut to a hill not too far away, and what do we see climbing that hill? THE DOG! it will come climbing up over the hill, with the sun setting directly behind it as it’s head peaks over the crest of the hill. And gamers everywhere will rejoice that their beloved war dog survived it’s suicide mission.

That’s not a big deal, really. It’s just a server browser but it’s in an actual browser. There are a lot of things that “ruined” Battlefield in BF3, but really the browser based launcher isn’t an issue. (the game doesn’t actually run in a browser like Facebook games, you realize)

It is a problem when their lazy corner cutting meant I was unable to start the game until I installed a browser it liked. That took a lot more effort than it should because i didn’t realise that the browser window was indeed what it was supposed to be opening right away. I thought it was just another example of Origin’s inability to create working shortcuts.

Especially when they utter shit like “They’re actually using an even higher version in many cases than the next-gen consoles, from a texture standpoint.”. I mean, what the hell does that even mean? They’re using a higher version of Call of Duty from a texture standpoint? Presumably, they mean the PC version will have high-res textures? Like every game that isn’t a totally miserable half-assed port?

No matter how great it looks, it won’t change the fact that (at least last time I played COD on PC, which was COD4) the multiplayer experience blows due to the ridiculous servers people set up, including having 48 people on a 12 person map. It’s just a boring series of spawn-die-spawn-die-spawn-die-spawn-die-spawn-die before you can even take five steps.

Also, “higher” (resolution textures, I’m guessing is what they meant?) Well, I’d hope so. It’s the most minimal effort someone could make to the PC version of any game.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen, I am not impressed by this introduction to the next generation. The demonstration footage they ran out yesterday was apparently played on an XB1… and it looked no better than the previous iteration. Hopefully we’ll see something much more significant come the next title, in a year, when they will hopefully be targeting the next generation, rather than merely porting to it.

Plus, apparently IW is taking out the “score streaks”, again. Only kills count toward getting rewards. That’s no fun for those of us who are old and suck.

I agree with all of your above points, but i thought i should point out that the ‘lame servers with 40 people on a 12 player map’ etc no longer happens because there hasn’t been server selection for the past few games. I also agree with how lame IW is being removing the scorestreaks. It seems that after CoD 4 Infinity ward has done nothing but take the series steps backwards.

I agree with the maps and slot counts. The main issue why I liked MW2 was the map assortment, and I didn’t even care much about the P2P servers as it worked with the map design. Black Ops had terrible map design and a standard of 18 slots for ranked servers that made them even worse. I vowed that was my last CoD game and haven’t touched the series since.

I can’t say the two or so maps I’ve seen for Ghosts look good design wise either. That’s the one thing that’s keeping me away from Ghosts.

It’s part of an elaborate government initiative to keep all of the teenage white males at home, rather than on the streets and getting all up in my face. They spend most of their time exploring each others sexuality, inexplicably.

Don’t forget that it’s both military ánd terrorist propaganda. Some kids play the game and think the military is just like that, so they sign up. Some people played the game and used it as a learning tool to commit acts of terrorism (I’m not going to state names here, but a few cases in the US, a case in Norway, and some cases in Russia are what I mean…).

Did anyone see that excellent article about the Call of Duty series in Forbes in which Mark Rubin (Infinity Ward) explained that Call of Duty no longer appeals to core gamers. They know that it has its own demographic who don’t play anything else. I find it a lot easier to respect the franchise when you realise that it is not really aimed at “us”. Call of Duty has become the “Sims” of this generation and is doing that job very well.

Marketing 101: Boast strong points and hide flaws. If this game was going to have dedicated servers they would have already come out and said it. It makes no sense from a marketing stance to not openly advertise it.

Good for them to have finally discovered what we media people call Cross-Media Publishing. And it only took them years.

But seriously, this just happened because they would be the laughing stock if they put the PS3/XB360 version on next-gen consoles, so they just thought “might as well put the better one on PC, too”. Not impressed.